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With Great Power #364... 22 Panels with Garth Ennis · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody! Welcome back to 22 Panels. I am joined this morning by one of my all-time favorite comic writers, Mr. Garth Ennis, coming to us from London. How's it going, Garth?
• 0:18
  GARTH ENNIS: It's going well, Tad, thank you. Nice to be here.
• 0:20
  Tad Eggleston: I, I…
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: I have been appreci… I mean, we just talked briefly off the air that I've been appreciating your work for literally as long as I can remember.
• 0:34
  Tad Eggleston: and I particularly appreciate your ability to go back and forth between more serious works and more…
• 0:41
  Tad Eggleston: absolutely batshit crazy, hilarious works. In fact, you're… you're like my…
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: you're my benchmark for batshit crazy. When I'm describing a book… to somebody…
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: that is that… that vein, and I'm trying to have them understand. I just… I just say, think Garth Ennis at his craziest.
• 1:07
  GARTH ENNIS: I think that… that ability to sort of switch might… might come from the comics I read as a kid. On the one hand, you had 2000 AD, on the other hand, you had Battle Action, which is a sort of war comic, but 2000AD in particular, because you're talking about weekly anthologies.
• 1:26
  GARTH ENNIS: five, six different stories every issue. I never saw anything strange about reading a very serious story, and then a few pages later, reading an absolutely insane one, moving on to, a very funny one.
• 1:42
  GARTH ENNIS: And going from there to something…
• 1:46
  GARTH ENNIS: intense and violent. Each week, you would have… you would have such a variety of stories, and I think it just taught me that,
• 1:56
  GARTH ENNIS: really, there was… there was never anything weird about that. So it's… it's something that I've kind of,
• 2:04
  GARTH ENNIS: I've kind of kept with me, you know?
• 2:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 2:08
  Tad Eggleston: How do you decide what… I mean, because the other thing that I appreciate is… is there's always…
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: some sort of underlying message. I can always tell a little bit what you're thinking about. You know, Babs, which we're here to promote, is…
• 2:28
  Tad Eggleston: is definitely just a batshit crazy sword and sorcery, flip it on its head and have the strong female protagonist book, but…
• 2:40
  Tad Eggleston: There's also a lot…
• 2:44
  Tad Eggleston: of social commentary for the US and Britain over the last decade embedded in that book. You know, I can tell that it's not just, oh, let's do this funny thing. It's like, I'm thinking about this, and I'm gonna…
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna let it out in this funny way. How do you decide when it's gonna be, I'm gonna… I'm going…
• 3:08
  Tad Eggleston: full-on crazy with what I'm thinking right now, versus…
• 3:13
  Tad Eggleston: something like Sarah, where you're much more serious.
• 3:21
  GARTH ENNIS: generally, it's… it's a question of what's appropriate to the story. So, if you look at something like Sarah, that's a war story. It's about, a team of Russian women snipers on the Eastern Front in World War II.
• 3:37
  GARTH ENNIS: Focusing on one of them in particular. People in… in that… doing that job at that time, it was a grim experience, it was a dark experience, it wasn't a happy life.
• 3:50
  GARTH ENNIS: Not that they didn't grab moments of happiness and humor when they could, but what's appropriate to that story is, I think, a serious approach. Now, on the other hand, a sword and sorcery book
• 4:02
  GARTH ENNIS: about a female barbarian. Well, that's been done a couple of times, usually without much in the way of humor.
• 4:12
  GARTH ENNIS: It seems to me that humor is almost the only way you could go on a book like that, because
• 4:18
  GARTH ENNIS: Otherwise, what you have is another red Sonia.
• 4:21
  GARTH ENNIS: Or another…
• 4:24
  GARTH ENNIS: God, I don't even know, is there something called Murata the She-Wolf? But in just the same way.
• 4:28
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds right.
• 4:29
  GARTH ENNIS: Umbrella.
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 4:30
  GARTH ENNIS: There's a number of Conan knockoffs, there's a number of Red Sonja knockoffs, and it doesn't seem to me…
• 4:36
  GARTH ENNIS: There doesn't seem to be, to me, to be any value in therefore doing a female barbarian story, unless you can get a few laughs out of it.
• 4:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So, so does the… The story come first, and the… the…
• 4:55
  Tad Eggleston: Commentary, connection to the world just seep its way in.
• 5:00
  GARTH ENNIS: Generally, the character will come first.
• 5:02
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 5:03
  GARTH ENNIS: the character, and then the story, and then anything else. In the case of Babs, she…
• 5:11
  GARTH ENNIS: sprang almost fully formed, actually. Once I thought of the idea of having,
• 5:21
  GARTH ENNIS: a female barbarian, and understanding that I was going to make it… make the story funny.
• 5:28
  GARTH ENNIS: I figured, well, there's two ways to do that. You can either have the character well aware of how ridiculous her world is, and go along with it and respond to it.
• 5:39
  GARTH ENNIS: Or, you can make her a typical barbarian character, where she's incredibly poe-faced and takes life and herself very, very seriously, and it's pretty obvious which way I went.
• 5:49
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. So, but the character generally comes first.
• 5:56
  GARTH ENNIS: with Bob's, I knew she was going to be a pretty formidable character. I also knew she was going to have a pretty shitty attitude.
• 6:04
  GARTH ENNIS: A nasty sense of humor, but to balance that out, she would not generally enjoy much in the way of good luck.
• 6:12
  GARTH ENNIS: Okay. There would be a number of banana skins thrown under her feet, metaphorically speaking, and half of the humor would be her getting herself into trouble through her own lousy attitude and greed.
• 6:28
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 6:29
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, I, I, I… It's always funny when I talk to creators, the way that, like.
• 6:38
  Tad Eggleston: the character in their mind and the character in my mind can sometimes differ, because I've never really thought of her as having a bad attitude as much as just being, like…
• 6:47
  Tad Eggleston: Jaded by the world.
• 6:49
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it's not like… at least it never feels like it's an intentionally bad attitude, as much as it's… I mean, because she does things, like…
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: go to save her friend, like, oh.
• 7:05
  Tad Eggleston: Now that I'm saving my friend, I need to take out this entire thing
• 7:08
  Tad Eggleston: I know there's no money in it.
• 7:10
  GARTH ENNIS: I mean, I know what.
• 7:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 7:12
  GARTH ENNIS: Many people like that.
• 7:13
  GARTH ENNIS: You can have people sort of worn down by life.
• 7:17
  GARTH ENNIS: You can have people who just have a sick sense of humor, but they will ultimately do the right thing. Babs will always do right by Izzy, because there's a bond between the two of them, that they'd be ready to die for each other. But that doesn't mean that Babs will act that way towards
• 7:36
  GARTH ENNIS: almost anyone else. In the second series, in the Black Road South, you can see that it was her own venality.
• 7:45
  GARTH ENNIS: that caused the problem in the first place. I find that more interesting than a character who, is inevitably and always good.
• 7:58
  GARTH ENNIS: It's far more interesting to me, I think, to have someone who fucks up.
• 8:04
  GARTH ENNIS: And then, in a kind of half-assed way.
• 8:07
  GARTH ENNIS: while trying to fix things, ends up doing the right thing. That to me is a more interesting path to go on.
• 8:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, one of the things I love about Babs is… is…
• 8:19
  Tad Eggleston: It seems like the world has…
• 8:23
  Tad Eggleston: Beaten her down to a place where she doesn't believe that doing good is worth it.
• 8:29
  Tad Eggleston: But she still has trouble…
• 8:33
  Tad Eggleston: not doing good when presented with the opportunity, you know? Like, she's got that goodness in her.
• 8:40
  GARTH ENNIS: How she's going to enrich herself.
• 8:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:43
  GARTH ENNIS: Humming up against doing the right thing when the chips are done.
• 8:49
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. Really, if it was up to her, she'd manage to get away.
• 8:54
  GARTH ENNIS: Scot-free, with the money, unencumbered by any kind of baggage of conscience, but unfortunately, her conscience won't let her do that.
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 9:04
  GARTH ENNIS: It's far more interesting and entertaining.
• 9:09
  GARTH ENNIS: For me to write someone with a shitty attitude, who's disrespectful to most people, so long as the people she's disrespectful to deserve it.
• 9:18
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. That, to me is half the fun. If you look at the stories, it's… it's very rare that she runs into a person who… who is a decent, admirable, good character.
• 9:35
  GARTH ENNIS: you might… Culpepper, Colin Culpepper, the sort of pathetic knight, he is almost a parody of that kind of character. He's… he likes to imagine himself as the kind of nightly character who appears in stories like this. My take on it is that someone like that would either be…
• 9:53
  GARTH ENNIS: a monster who thinks that they're a good guy, or more likely like Culpepper, someone who has widely inflated notions of self and their place in the world.
• 10:06
  Tad Eggleston: No, I appreciate that, that I… like I said, I was just rereading the first volume, and I'd kind of forgotten Culpepper and got… you know, and that's… that's another talent that you have across the years, is you don't…
• 10:23
  Tad Eggleston: You don't write filler characters.
• 10:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there's a depth to, you know… I mean, as much as…
• 10:32
  Tad Eggleston: a re-read a preacher, I will immediately… Jesse and Cassidy and Tulip become good friends again. Like, the reread makes me remember, oh, wait.
• 10:44
  Tad Eggleston: Th- there are… there are the… the…
• 10:49
  Tad Eggleston: so many, and see, it's been long enough since my last reread that I'm not coming up with names, but there's so many other smaller characters that have real depth.
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: Is that something that just comes to you, or is that something that you work on?
• 11:04
  GARTH ENNIS: I think it's something that… I think it's the former. I think sometimes I'll create a character who is just supposed to be filler.
• 11:11
  GARTH ENNIS: But they'll intrigue me in a way that I wasn't expecting.
• 11:15
  GARTH ENNIS: That happens all the time. I just happened to be writing something at the moment where there's a crowd scene, like, and we focus in on just a little family group.
• 11:26
  GARTH ENNIS: Because I wanted to write some ordinary members of the public having a response to what the audience is there to see. I'm being deliberately opaque here. Of course.
• 11:39
  GARTH ENNIS: But I can already tell while I'm writing these characters that
• 11:43
  GARTH ENNIS: the way the three or four of them, sort of bounce off each other is something I'd like to see more of.
• 11:50
  GARTH ENNIS: Okay. So, and so it was with…
• 11:54
  GARTH ENNIS: Well, Culpepper, actually, I didn't expect him to show up again, but there's a certain amount of value to writing Culpepper. He's a good guy, but he's a pathetic guy, and also, there's a pompous quality to him that you'll see in the last episode of the second series, that comes
• 12:12
  GARTH ENNIS: That comes.
• 12:13
  Tad Eggleston: The one that I haven't read yet.
• 12:15
  GARTH ENNIS: Looking forward to it.
• 12:16
  Tad Eggleston: to it now.
• 12:17
  GARTH ENNIS: When is that out? That's, I think it's out in a couple of months.
• 12:21
  Tad Eggleston: It should be open.
• 12:23
  GARTH ENNIS: Toward the end of the year.
• 12:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I think… I think it may be even… even sooner than a couple of months, but just know it hasn't been released yet.
• 12:31
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 12:32
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, because that was the one that… that… that I didn't get a, a digital reread copy of.
• 12:41
  Tad Eggleston: one.
• 12:42
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah, that one's… I think that one's only just been finished. Right. Jason has only just finished drawing it. That one, that one you'll see, Culpepper…
• 12:53
  GARTH ENNIS: You'll, you'll see him sort of…
• 12:55
  GARTH ENNIS: Sort of at his best and at his worst.
• 12:58
  GARTH ENNIS: Not that Culpeper necessarily has a best, but he was an idea, that I initially thought he would show up for a couple of pages, he would be, he would be a classic kind of nightly character.
• 13:15
  GARTH ENNIS: fed through the satirical ringer, until you realize that the guy couldn't be less self-aware. And then, I thought, well, it would be fun to have him come back. There's a lot of possibilities with a character like that.
• 13:29
  Tad Eggleston: Bam.
• 13:32
  Tad Eggleston: comics are a collaborative medium, so there's the words that you put on the page, and then there's the full art version that comes back to you. Are there sometimes times where characters come more alive when you see what your artist has done with them?
• 13:50
  GARTH ENNIS: Yes. When you have a good artist. Very, very much so. With, Sarah, what Steve Epting did there.
• 13:59
  GARTH ENNIS: Really brought the lead character to life.
• 14:03
  GARTH ENNIS: He did the same thing on Partisan.
• 14:05
  GARTH ENNIS: On barbs, when Jason sent me his initial designs, which I still have somewhere.
• 14:13
  GARTH ENNIS: In fact, I think they were reprinted in the first trade.
• 14:17
  Tad Eggleston: They are.
• 14:18
  GARTH ENNIS: she was exactly as I saw her. It was like he was looking in my mind. Jason and I have a long history, creatively. We do.
• 14:26
  GARTH ENNIS: And and so at this point, we probably are reading each other's minds in creative terms, and… and Bob's…
• 14:34
  GARTH ENNIS: was instantly there. Likewise, when I saw Culpepper.
• 14:38
  GARTH ENNIS: I, I thought, I instantly thought.
• 14:42
  GARTH ENNIS: Jason's absolutely got the idea. We should… we should only ever see his eyes. We shouldn't see his face.
• 14:48
  GARTH ENNIS: Because… and at this point, you'll never see Culpepper's face, because it would be a disappointment if he took off his helmet and revealed a deliberately wimpy face. Well.
• 15:01
  GARTH ENNIS: what does that serve? That's… that's no.
• 15:03
  Tad Eggleston: No, you gotta go… I mean, even if you do that, you gotta go the other way. He's gotta… he's gotta be, like, way more handsome and… and… and…
• 15:10
  Tad Eggleston: Which also?
• 15:12
  GARTH ENNIS: Which also gets you nothing, so better…
• 15:14
  Tad Eggleston: It doesn't get you much, but it's better than if he's wimpy.
• 15:18
  GARTH ENNIS: Underpants, you've got… you're gonna have a character who, will always keep that helmet on.
• 15:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, absolutely.
• 15:24
  GARTH ENNIS: Those terrified eyes of his are the best way for him to express himself.
• 15:28
  Tad Eggleston: They absolutely are. But I think I was asking more, are there characters
• 15:36
  Tad Eggleston: The ones that grow, are there times where one of those ancillary characters that you've put in that you don't think is going to be much becomes something because of
• 15:49
  Tad Eggleston: How your artist, envisions them.
• 15:54
  GARTH ENNIS: Sometimes, sometimes, yeah, sometimes they'll… sometimes they'll come up with a design that…
• 16:03
  GARTH ENNIS: kind of inspires further thought. Of course, you know, now my mind is going to empty of examples.
• 16:12
  GARTH ENNIS: But… I suppose if you go back to Preacher.
• 16:17
  GARTH ENNIS: and you look at Star, I think Star was gonna get killed early on.
• 16:23
  GARTH ENNIS: Until…
• 16:25
  GARTH ENNIS: something about the way… yeah, I don't think he was even gonna survive those first four issues he was in, but something about the way Steve drew him, something about that…
• 16:34
  GARTH ENNIS: The hardness of his face and the frustration
• 16:38
  GARTH ENNIS: That he expressed, largely through his eyes, and the curl of his lip, just that…
• 16:44
  GARTH ENNIS: permanent disdain and dissatisfaction with the, the rest of the world. I, I think…
• 16:51
  GARTH ENNIS: that's what helped me realize that I had… I had the arch-villain.
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 16:57
  GARTH ENNIS: Because…
• 16:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's a big one.
• 17:01
  GARTH ENNIS: At that point, it's not the Saint of Killers. We've established at the Saint of Killers, there's a certain ambiguity to his motivation. He's more of a force of nature than a villain. There's obviously Jesse's grandmother and her henchmen, but they've just been wiped out.
• 17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 17:20
  GARTH ENNIS: And it's… I think at that point, the book is probably looking for a villain, a good Darth Vader-type evil overlord villain.
• 17:31
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. And Star… Star sort of stepped quite neatly into that role, but a large part of it was… was what Steve did with the character.
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… that's just fascinating to me, because of all of the characters that you've ever written.
• 17:48
  Tad Eggleston: I think the last one I would have imagined being something that… that, like… grew organically is… is Star.
• 17:56
  GARTH ENNIS: bullets.
• 17:57
  Tad Eggleston: He just… he seems so… integral to the story, the idea that he was originally an arc.
• 18:05
  GARTH ENNIS: Something to do with, Something to do with that.
• 18:09
  GARTH ENNIS: Absolute misanthropy of his, where maybe at one point he did start out with some sort of higher purpose in mind.
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 18:19
  GARTH ENNIS: But everyone lets them down, everyone disappoints him, or pisses him off, or doesn't come up.
• 18:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 18:25
  GARTH ENNIS: standards. There's a good deal of hypocrisy there on his part.
• 18:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, yeah.
• 18:29
  GARTH ENNIS: And… and so… and so he can't help but express himself in the most miserable
• 18:37
  GARTH ENNIS: and wretched and misanthropic way possible. He was, as you've probably guessed, enormous fun to write.
• 18:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no, I mean, like, he… he qualifies as one of my all-time favorite villains, just because of all of the things you just said. Also, because it was hilarious when his penis… er, when his head started looking like a penis.
• 19:01
  GARTH ENNIS: so good.
• 19:02
  Tad Eggleston: That's another.
• 19:04
  GARTH ENNIS: Another aspect to it of… earlier on, I talked about characters that take themselves too seriously. Well, generally…
• 19:11
  GARTH ENNIS: in comics and fantasy fiction generally, villains do take themselves too seriously. There's very few of them can laugh at themselves. Right. It's not like, you know.
• 19:22
  GARTH ENNIS: Darth Vader ever dropped his lightsaber and started muttering, oh, Butterfingers, what have I done? Right. Or anything like that. They always… not only do they always assume that they themselves are right.
• 19:36
  GARTH ENNIS: But they also… they also assume that no one would ever dare laugh at them.
• 19:41
  GARTH ENNIS: Star, I think, is the ultimate result of that.
• 19:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 19:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 19:48
  Tad Eggleston: A couple of your series now have been… adapt.
• 19:57
  Tad Eggleston: to… to… I mean, Preacher, less so. But the boy is wildly successful television…
• 20:08
  Tad Eggleston: Is that something that… Excites you, or is that something that is more…
• 20:14
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, this gives me, more financial stability to write more comics.
• 20:20
  GARTH ENNIS: The latter.
• 20:21
  GARTH ENNIS: With a third element, which is that in both cases, obviously, especially the boys, sales of my original stories are boosted beyond anything I could possibly have imagined. Both Preacher and the boys, especially the boys, have found audiences
• 20:41
  GARTH ENNIS: That I could never have reached otherwise, and now my stories are current.
• 20:47
  GARTH ENNIS: They're kept in print, and they're in… they're in front of entire… an entire new… entirely new generation. Yeah. The boys is 20 years old, preacher is.
• 20:59
  Tad Eggleston: I know.
• 20:59
  GARTH ENNIS: plus years old.
• 21:01
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in…
• 21:01
  GARTH ENNIS: to me when I stop and think about it.
• 21:04
  Tad Eggleston: Me too. Me too, because I read both of those as they were coming out.
• 21:08
  GARTH ENNIS: Possage your time.
• 21:09
  GARTH ENNIS: But if I had… without those shows, as you can imagine, the sales would have done the usual thing a book does when it's collected on the chart, and then started to slacken off.
• 21:22
  GARTH ENNIS: with the occasional little bump whenever they decided to put out a new edition, but as you can guess, those times would have been few and far between. Now, in fact, those books have reached
• 21:35
  GARTH ENNIS: so many people, far more than I could ever have imagined, and that's thanks to those shows.
• 21:41
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, in both cases, I enjoy the shows. I think… I think Preacher…
• 21:49
  Tad Eggleston: Preacher gets short… shorter… shorter shrift than it deserves. I think it was… it was hurt by the fact that they didn't go on the road until the second season, whereas…
• 21:59
  Tad Eggleston: You got the book on the road really quickly?
• 22:03
  GARTH ENNIS: Creature is a very, very difficult beast to get a grip on. Right. The Boys is easy, you can do it in one line. Superheroes are bastards, and they need a slap, and here are the guys who are gonna do it. Creature, can you… can you do that in one line? I mean, there's…
• 22:22
  GARTH ENNIS: there's a preacher who's searching for God because God's gone on the run because he's a bad guy, but the reason for that is not going to be revealed, and there's… his best friend's a vampire, and…
• 22:36
  GARTH ENNIS: and his girlfriend's an assassin, and… and… oh, did I mention the Saint of Killers? Oh, and here's our face. You can't…
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, and don't, don't forget the Word of God.
• 22:46
  Tad Eggleston: You could…
• 22:47
  GARTH ENNIS: There's that.
• 22:47
  Tad Eggleston: There's that.
• 22:49
  GARTH ENNIS: But there's no way you can come up with one line.
• 22:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, but you did an awfully good job with one issue.
• 22:57
  GARTH ENNIS: I mean, that's what I'm saying is there's no way you can come up with one line.
• 23:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 23:01
  GARTH ENNIS: And that's what Hollywood needs, remember?
• 23:03
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 23:03
  GARTH ENNIS: out one line.
• 23:05
  GARTH ENNIS: And everything they do flows from that, from that core concept. They don't really have the freedom, I think, to do what I did with the book, which is just to start it off, get rolling, and while there's a vague plot structure behind the whole thing.
• 23:23
  GARTH ENNIS: explore all sorts of streams, little stops along the road. As you said, get it on the road.
• 23:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 23:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean.
• 23:30
  GARTH ENNIS: So they can't really do that, they don't have that freedom. That's.
• 23:35
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and budgetarily, it also is more expensive to do a road trip show than to do something that's set
• 23:43
  Tad Eggleston: in a, you know, I mean, my theory has always been, and I've never talked to anybody involved, so it's just a theory,
• 23:51
  Tad Eggleston: That one of the reasons that the first season was set
• 23:55
  Tad Eggleston: in one place is it was essentially the proof-of-concept season. Like, if this does well enough, then we'll spend a little bit more, and we'll go on the road.
• 24:05
  GARTH ENNIS: You may well have something there. I… I didn't worry too much about that.
• 24:11
  GARTH ENNIS: I, I think it was more a case for me of just sort of watching them.
• 24:18
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah. Fill out the background of the thing.
• 24:20
  Tad Eggleston: I… I think that's the healthiest way to do it, because… I mean, ultimately, any adaptation between mediums is going to be a different beast.
• 24:29
  Tad Eggleston: The best adaptations, I think, are not actually the ones that stay closest to their material, as much as closest to the essence of their material.
• 24:43
  GARTH ENNIS: I think that's probably true.
• 24:44
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 24:46
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because, I mean, again, like, one of the reasons that I… Love comics.
• 24:52
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and preachers, one of the examples that I'll use is, is…
• 24:58
  Tad Eggleston: you know, particularly in the years that was on… on TV, and people would come in and go, oh, I love this show, let me grab the comic. And I'd go, yeah, you know, the entire first season of the show
• 25:10
  Tad Eggleston: Can really be encapsulated in the first issue.
• 25:14
  Tad Eggleston: This 60-issue series.
• 25:17
  GARTH ENNIS: Because that's the power of comics. Right. The first couple of scenes.
• 25:25
  GARTH ENNIS: But that is, as you say, the power of comics. We can go anywhere, we can do anything.
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, the pacing is…
• 25:34
  Tad Eggleston: There's so much more to be able to play with between the pacing, between… it just…
• 25:39
  Tad Eggleston: different types of storytelling, etc.
• 25:44
  Tad Eggleston: Which is a great segue into, what drew you to comics?
• 25:52
  GARTH ENNIS: I think I read just the right comic at just the right age, and that was 2000 AD, age 7.
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 26:00
  GARTH ENNIS: I picked it up…
• 26:02
  GARTH ENNIS: In my local, what we call news agent, what you would call newsstand, in, the…
• 26:10
  GARTH ENNIS: or spring of 1977. I mentioned it was an anthology. The first issue, had a variety
• 26:18
  GARTH ENNIS: of stories. There was, sort of space opera, there was a future cop story, there was a dystopian, invaded, occupied Britain story.
• 26:31
  GARTH ENNIS: There was a future sports story. My favorite was a story called Flesh. That was about, 23rd century cowboys coming back in time to,
• 26:44
  GARTH ENNIS: farm the dinosaurs.
• 26:47
  GARTH ENNIS: For meat, because for some reason, in the 23rd century, they'd run out of meat. And so someone figured out, well, the dinosaurs went extinct anyway, why don't we go back and farm them? Not thinking for a second that, maybe that was the reason they went extinct.
• 27:06
  GARTH ENNIS: However, the reason that blew my mind,
• 27:10
  GARTH ENNIS: as a 7-year-old was, the big predators, like T-Rexes and velociraptors and Ceratosaurs and allosaurs and so on, they, in some instinctive way, had realized that mankind was wiping out their food source.
• 27:27
  GARTH ENNIS: So the only thing for them to do was to assault the human base en masse, and what followed was one of the most violent stories any 7-year-old has ever read. It was… it was like Jurassic Park meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was, how can we creatively kill people?
• 27:45
  GARTH ENNIS: This week, and most of that had to do with them falling into Tyrannosaur's mouth.
• 27:51
  GARTH ENNIS: it was that kind of thing, and Judge Dredd, and Dan Dare, and the other stories I've mentioned, getting a grip on me at that age. Right.
• 28:02
  GARTH ENNIS: woke me up to the possibilities of comics. Not that I would have been able to articulate that at the time, all I would have been able to say was, I want more of this. But I grew up with 2000 AD, I stayed with it, I picked up its companion title, Battle Action, which…
• 28:18
  GARTH ENNIS: set off my interest in war comics, but that's another story. But 2000 AD, of course, eventually employed Alan Moore.
• 28:26
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. Which was a whole other evolutionary step, and of course, Alan moves to American comics, and I go with him, and I discover Frank Miller, and I discover Hard Chacon, and I discover Paul Chadwick and Peter Bagg. Really, really, I think that
• 28:44
  GARTH ENNIS: That mid to late 80s period in comics.
• 28:49
  GARTH ENNIS: is… One of the most creative, interesting… creatively interesting times in the.
• 28:58
  Tad Eggleston: Histories.
• 28:59
  GARTH ENNIS: The, the history… It's when everything happens at once, and I was lucky to be there at that time.
• 29:06
  GARTH ENNIS: So, I guess the short answer to your question is they drew me in at just the right age, and I was lucky enough to spend the next 10 years reading just the right comics as the medium evolved.
• 29:20
  Tad Eggleston: And just absolutely hooked from there. That's… that's a great story.
• 29:24
  GARTH ENNIS: And seeing the possibility… Yeah, seeing the…
• 29:28
  Tad Eggleston: Because I have to go back to all of them.
• 29:30
  GARTH ENNIS: First time.
• 29:30
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than…
• 29:31
  GARTH ENNIS: this point, At this… at this point in time, people are pushing the medium in all directions.
• 29:38
  GARTH ENNIS: They're not holding back, they're, they're looking at all the possibilities, and…
• 29:45
  GARTH ENNIS: And they don't know what the rules are, because there aren't any rules. There's nothing to say, you can't do this, or you must do that.
• 29:54
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in the…
• 29:54
  GARTH ENNIS: It's all very, very much…
• 29:56
  GARTH ENNIS: That's… that's the most… that's the most… that's what makes it the most interesting period.
• 30:01
  GARTH ENNIS: You don't know what you can't do.
• 30:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that to me is one of the greatest things about comics, period, is there aren't any rules. Yeah. I mean, it feels like…
• 30:15
  Tad Eggleston: at least every year, and seemingly sometimes every month, I'll read a comic that I'm like, I've… I've never seen anybody do this before, and this is really cool.
• 30:26
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 30:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, with you talking about that, I mean, I have felt for a couple of years now that we're living in
• 30:39
  Tad Eggleston: what Chris Condon and I have started calling the Platinum Age of Comics, because there are so many good comics coming out right now that you can't possibly read them all.
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: And that makes me really wonder what the creators 20 years from now are gonna be.
• 30:55
  GARTH ENNIS: of the ones.
• 30:56
  Tad Eggleston: That got to grow up on these.
• 30:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, cause… I mean, so many of the people that you just talked about are still working.
• 31:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. It's still doing amazing stuff, but you also have…
• 31:09
  Tad Eggleston: your generation that built off of them. You've got the Brian K. Vaughn generation that built off of them, and now you've got people like Jesse Lonergan, and Meredith McLaren, and Victor, you know, a whole extra generation that grew out of all… I mean, like…
• 31:28
  Tad Eggleston: you can just feel… I mean, it's kind of like rock and roll. I mean, everybody keeps talking about rock and roll being over, and I'm like, are you kidding me? It's just got… it's just got more branches, because everybody…
• 31:40
  GARTH ENNIS: I think you're right, and it's an interesting question, too. What will people be doing in 20 years? And it's a really nice thing to hear, and it's a really nice thing to consider, because it gives the lie to that constant
• 31:51
  GARTH ENNIS: notion, comics are finished, comics are doomed, comics are… I've been hearing that pretty much since I got into the business, like, we've only got 5 more years, we've only got…
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: time… I think the first time you can find an article…
• 32:06
  GARTH ENNIS: of question.
• 32:08
  GARTH ENNIS: creative question that you've asked that I think is going to give the lie to all that doomsen.
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. And comics have been doomed since, what, 1915? Oh, yeah, sure. We hadn't even gotten to comic books before people started talking about comics being doomed.
• 32:28
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah, this is finished, this is over. It's… it's not… there's gonna be people, as you say, who are inspired, and they're gonna keep moving forward.
• 32:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm always… I'm always really struck… I mean, because as… as I've done the podcast, I've started looking back at a lot of stuff.
• 32:46
  Tad Eggleston: that I hadn't encountered before, including getting into some of the old
• 32:52
  Tad Eggleston: daily and Sunday strips from the teens and 20s and whatnot, and it's like…
• 32:59
  Tad Eggleston: on one side, like, we're discovering new things and whatnot, and on another side, like, go look at some Roy Crane, and it's like, oh wait, there were people doing this ages ago, and then somehow it vanished for a while.
• 33:14
  Tad Eggleston: And then it came back!
• 33:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know, look at Spirit comics, or Crazy Cat, you know. Yeah.
• 33:23
  Tad Eggleston: There… there… as with so much art, there's the ebb and flow of capitalism, there's the ebb and flow of…
• 33:31
  Tad Eggleston: People pointing at it and saying, that's what caused your children to be horrible.
• 33:37
  GARTH ENNIS: Yes, yes, well, that's.
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: Did you have?
• 33:38
  GARTH ENNIS: Another specter looming alongside the whole thing, hasn't it? I mean, like, that's been there every step of the way. People scapegoating fiction.
• 33:47
  GARTH ENNIS: In this case, comics for society's ills. Comics are an easy one, because of course.
• 33:54
  GARTH ENNIS: many people still see them as a children's medium. Now, I personally would not like children reading my stuff at all. I think of it as being, sort of, for 15, 16, and up.
• 34:07
  Tad Eggleston: Give my… my 5-year-old granddaughter Punisher.
• 34:11
  GARTH ENNIS: Possibly not yet.
• 34:13
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly not, yeah.
• 34:15
  GARTH ENNIS: Give her a couple of years.
• 34:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think Babs would be the first one I'd give her anyway.
• 34:20
  GARTH ENNIS: When you're actually looking at their stuff.
• 34:24
  GARTH ENNIS: I… I think that…
• 34:27
  GARTH ENNIS: well, actually, you mentioned the Punisher, that's a really good example. The Punisher's one that is constantly being scapegoated. It is. As if by,
• 34:37
  GARTH ENNIS: removing this objectionable comic character with a symbol that we don't like, that we've come to associate with unpleasant things in society, we will cure all those ills. Absolute balls, of course. Those things will continue to exist. It will not change anyone's behavior one iota.
• 34:57
  GARTH ENNIS: It will just make shareholders feel better, which I would argue is the point of that recent attempt to redesign the Punisher symbol, which they abandoned as soon as they'd done it.
• 35:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, because shareholders don't feel better when sales are down.
• 35:13
  GARTH ENNIS: Right.
• 35:14
  GARTH ENNIS: Right.
• 35:15
  Tad Eggleston: I don't like that one.
• 35:16
  GARTH ENNIS: weird feeling they get when they're being associated with something Iffy.
• 35:23
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. But this… and of course, something must be done.
• 35:28
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. We must at least have the… give the appearance of having.
• 35:32
  Tad Eggleston: appearance.
• 35:32
  GARTH ENNIS: We're doing something. That's what the shareholders want more than anything else. That's what…
• 35:37
  GARTH ENNIS: anxious parents groups want more than anything else. You need… this is the curse of the age. You need to be able to give the appearance of having done something. Well, that was it.
• 35:48
  GARTH ENNIS: Yep.
• 35:52
  Tad Eggleston: We're running up on the time allotted. I have a couple of closing questions, but first, there was one thing…
• 36:00
  Tad Eggleston: Popped into my head before…
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: or while I was reading Babs, and there was a scene with the bear, and it immediately reminded me that you wrote…
• 36:13
  Tad Eggleston: One of my favorite scenes ever, also involving a bear in Central Park.
• 36:22
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I, I can't…
• 36:24
  GARTH ENNIS: I can't talk to.
• 36:24
  Tad Eggleston: Garth Ennis and not ask about the polar bear, and how that popped into your head, because I can't tell you how many times I have brought up that page, and just…
• 36:36
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 36:36
  Tad Eggleston: affection.
• 36:39
  GARTH ENNIS: is because that came from me visiting Central Park Zoo, which remains one of my favorite places to spend time. It's a lovely spot, the animals have lots of space. The fact that it's smack in the middle of New York City.
• 36:57
  GARTH ENNIS: only adds to its charm, and I've… and I found myself wandering around it one day.
• 37:03
  GARTH ENNIS: And it was probably in the run-up to writing The Punisher, thinking, what would Frank do? Like, wouldn't it be fun to have Frank.
• 37:09
  Tad Eggleston: Trump.
• 37:10
  GARTH ENNIS: in here.
• 37:12
  GARTH ENNIS: Out of ammo, out of guns, and having to use what came to hand. And what comes to hand are the animals, the big snakes.
• 37:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:19
  GARTH ENNIS: the Piranha tank, and of course, the bears. And bears are great…
• 37:25
  GARTH ENNIS: for comedy violence, because there's something humorous about them. I think it's… I think it's their appearance versus the reality, because so long as a bear doesn't actually, haha, bear its teeth at you, it still looks like…
• 37:40
  GARTH ENNIS: A reasonably, reasonably benevolent animal?
• 37:44
  GARTH ENNIS: Of course, once you see its teeth and the claws come out, you know, you're doomed, and it becomes a different creature entirely. But it has that quality that a wolf does not, or a lion or a tiger does not. There is no way you can look at them and think they are anything other but big killing machines.
• 38:02
  GARTH ENNIS: When you first see a bear with its, you know, its huge ass and its big belly, and it's… I mean, let's face it, we're… there's a reason teddy bears
• 38:12
  GARTH ENNIS: were created. And it seemed to me… it's always seemed to me that bears are funny until they start tearing you to pieces. Those faces, those adorable faces. So bear-based humor, yes, is something that I've always had a lot of time for, and
• 38:30
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's even the… That's even the Frank Castle line, isn't it? Docile.
• 38:36
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah. Yeah, well, at that point, you know.
• 38:38
  Tad Eggleston: Friendly, docile. This won't do it all.
• 38:42
  GARTH ENNIS: the most violent preacher in the world, in and of itself, because it spends most of its time sitting in a… sitting in an enclosure, looking out at people and wondering what the hell they're doing. So, Frank has to sort of spice it up a bit.
• 38:57
  GARTH ENNIS: Bob's, of course, does that by accident, by shooting a crossbow bolt into the thing's big butt.
• 39:03
  GARTH ENNIS: But in both cases, you know, the bear then does kind of the other thing you want the bear to do, which is to react with extreme violence. What is it they say,
• 39:15
  GARTH ENNIS: If it's black, fight block.
• 39:17
  GARTH ENNIS: If it's brown, lie down. If it's white, good night.
• 39:23
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds about right.
• 39:24
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah, that's…
• 39:24
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
• 39:25
  GARTH ENNIS: Bear… bear wisdom, I believe.
• 39:28
  GARTH ENNIS: Absolutely not.
• 39:28
  Tad Eggleston: I've always liked, how do you tell the difference between a brown bear and a grizzly bear?
• 39:35
  GARTH ENNIS: When…
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: When you climb a tree, the grizzly bear will knock it down, the brown bear will climb up after you.
• 39:41
  GARTH ENNIS: Well, there you go. There you go. There's something… there's also something about…
• 39:48
  GARTH ENNIS: Because people carry little bales and pepper spray, you know, to either scare off or defend against bears.
• 39:58
  GARTH ENNIS: And that's how you can always tell grizzly bear shit, because it's full of bales and it stinks of pepper.
• 40:06
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 40:09
  GARTH ENNIS: Bears, you see, bear humor, it's grit.
• 40:12
  Tad Eggleston: It is, it is, I love it. Alright, closing questions. The first is, I've been at this for 5 years, and I feel like I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. I mean, I got up at 9am in the morning to talk to Garth Ennis.
• 40:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it doesn't actually feel like that uncommon of a day to me. You know, I mean, 20 years ago, if you told me that I was gonna get on a call with Garth Ennis, I would have asked you what you were smoking.
• 40:43
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, it's more common now. But I've found that, like, all of us in this field.
• 40:53
  Tad Eggleston: have some element of that. Everybody has a story that, like, the 10-year-old version of them
• 41:00
  Tad Eggleston: would never believe, and or where even… even them now will pinch themselves when they think about it and go, did I really get to do that? Did that happen? Did I meet that person? So I've started collecting those stories. Tell me… tell me one of your great moments that never would have happened if you weren't in comics.
• 41:21
  GARTH ENNIS: Well, there's… I mean, there's what?
• 41:26
  GARTH ENNIS: What a career… Successfully writing fiction allows you to do.
• 41:32
  GARTH ENNIS: And then there's stuff that's piss… that's specific…
• 41:37
  GARTH ENNIS: To comics, which, as you say, usually involves meeting people?
• 41:41
  GARTH ENNIS: Okay, so slightly…
• 41:43
  Tad Eggleston: People coming up to you. I get a lot of stories from people that remember that one fan that came and
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: like… meant something to them at a table. I guess…
• 41:55
  GARTH ENNIS: That's meeting.
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: somebody, too.
• 41:57
  GARTH ENNIS: Right, right. I mean, I was gonna come up… I had a.
• 42:01
  Tad Eggleston: But I'll take… I'll take the oblique, Jake. Go for it.
• 42:03
  GARTH ENNIS: on this.
• 42:04
  Tad Eggleston: I like odd takes.
• 42:05
  GARTH ENNIS: when I was a kid, one of the, comics I liked.
• 42:12
  GARTH ENNIS: And I didn't get to see many issues of this for… or episodes of this.
• 42:19
  GARTH ENNIS: very occasionally due to its peculiar publishing history, but there was a strip in a comic called Action called Hook Jaw.
• 42:26
  GARTH ENNIS: And Hook Jaw was about a great white shark, and it was a sort of forerunner of the thing I mentioned, flesh, where, on a weekly basis, how many people can fall into the great white shark's mouth.
• 42:40
  GARTH ENNIS: and… be bitten in half, or whatever. How can we… how can we contrive that?
• 42:46
  GARTH ENNIS: on a weekly basis, and as you can imagine, they find many interesting ways to do it.
• 42:53
  GARTH ENNIS: And I suppose that, and other aspects.
• 42:58
  GARTH ENNIS: of sharks put the hook in me, haha, and when I was, in my late 30s, I found myself in a cage hanging off the back of a boat.
• 43:10
  GARTH ENNIS: In the Southern Ocean, off the south coast of Australia, watching great white sharks do their thing.
• 43:17
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 43:18
  GARTH ENNIS: And… There is a certain logic.
• 43:22
  GARTH ENNIS: To seeing the thing you first encountered in fiction.
• 43:27
  GARTH ENNIS: Either because it was wholly fictional, or because it was… It's real, but highly unusual.
• 43:36
  GARTH ENNIS: Right. Seeing that in real life. There is a certain magic to that.
• 43:41
  GARTH ENNIS: Now obviously, these sharks behaved like sharks and not the demonic eating machines that we turned them into in fiction, but there was still something…
• 43:51
  GARTH ENNIS: Incredible about that.
• 43:53
  GARTH ENNIS: Seeing… seeing this thing, this creature that, while very much a part of the real world.
• 44:00
  GARTH ENNIS: not.
• 44:01
  GARTH ENNIS: not a prehistoric creature like a dinosaur, or a mythological one like a dragon, but equally impressive, I think, seeing.
• 44:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 44:09
  GARTH ENNIS: Appear in front of you in real life.
• 44:12
  GARTH ENNIS: Had a special quality that,
• 44:15
  GARTH ENNIS: well, that I can recommend if you, if you can ever, if you can ever pull off something similar.
• 44:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, I, I, I,
• 44:23
  Tad Eggleston: You're making me think of the first baseball game I got to go to, because I'd been watching it on TV.
• 44:29
  GARTH ENNIS: Right.
• 44:29
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 44:30
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 44:30
  Tad Eggleston: And loving it, but then… but then being there and… and seeing the grass.
• 44:36
  GARTH ENNIS: Wouldn't it be great to… that thing? Yeah.
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's… now I'm gonna have to think about more experiences that I've had like that, because they are, they're really special. When you have that imagination of what something's like, but you've never gotten to do it, and then to be able to…
• 44:59
  Tad Eggleston: to be up close and see it, feel it, etc, is… is a cool… yeah, no, that's a… that's a great one, Garth! You continue… you continue to impress.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, last question. Sure. Tell me something, tell me something you love.
• 45:17
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules, but something that you love.
• 45:27
  Tad Eggleston: And not enough people around you have experienced it, and you really want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 45:34
  GARTH ENNIS: Oh, God. Blimey. I mean, you know, you think of movie titles and comic book titles.
• 45:42
  GARTH ENNIS: There's a writer I really, really like. His name is Derek Robinson. He's quite elderly now, but, in the 70s…
• 45:53
  GARTH ENNIS: beginning in the 70s and for the following 40 years, he wrote a series of novels, which I think of as a sort of best-kept secret.
• 46:01
  GARTH ENNIS: that I wish wasn't a secret. He's an English writer, he writes about a subject very dear to my heart.
• 46:10
  GARTH ENNIS: Combat aviation.
• 46:12
  GARTH ENNIS: He's written about the First and Second World Wars. He's… he's caught…
• 46:19
  GARTH ENNIS: I think the reality of that
• 46:22
  GARTH ENNIS: For… for the participants of the… of those two eras.
• 46:27
  GARTH ENNIS: In a way that I've not seen done before. He himself writes a… he talks about writing about war.
• 46:35
  GARTH ENNIS: as if it's one damn thing after another. So we're not talking about the secret mission, or the black op, or the job that will change the course of the war. We're talking about people who experience war.
• 46:47
  GARTH ENNIS: On a daily basis, If they're lucky, it will continue. Simply as… A job to be done.
• 46:57
  GARTH ENNIS: As a reality that has to be faced and endured, and the stresses on them, and the humor that results
• 47:07
  GARTH ENNIS: I've never really seen anything else like him, like this guy's work.
• 47:14
  GARTH ENNIS: The best way I can describe it… I saw somebody once describe him as Joseph Heller meets Evelyn Waugh, so the insanity of Catch-22, with a sort of… a sort of English restraint.
• 47:26
  GARTH ENNIS: Okay.
• 47:28
  GARTH ENNIS: He… he wrote his… he wrote my favourite novel, which is called Piece of Cake.
• 47:34
  GARTH ENNIS: But he's also written Gosshog Squadron, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
• 47:40
  GARTH ENNIS: a good, clean fight, a splendid little war. He has a take on… Human behavior in…
• 47:50
  GARTH ENNIS: in war… in wartime… in a wartime setting that I've really never seen…
• 47:56
  GARTH ENNIS: anywhere else. And a few friends of mine do enjoy his work.
• 48:01
  GARTH ENNIS: Occasionally, and I'm sure you know what this is like when you run into someone who likes that thing that you thought you were the only real fan of.
• 48:09
  GARTH ENNIS: A few of my friends like him, occasionally I'll run into someone else who does, but I wish he wasn't such a well-kept secret, because I think he's a tremendous writer. Lots of action, and very, very funny, and a real insight into the human condition.
• 48:26
  Tad Eggleston: I… I… I'm intrigued, particularly because the way you describe him, I can only imagine that he's influenced your war comics and… and…
• 48:37
  Tad Eggleston: I don't read a ton of war comics, but you and Harvey Kurtzman are the two that…
• 48:44
  Tad Eggleston: that I'll make the time for, because… It is that more… Everyday aspect, rather than…
• 48:55
  Tad Eggleston: big secret mission, or whatever. Right.
• 48:58
  GARTH ENNIS: Today we cross another river, go up another hill.
• 49:02
  GARTH ENNIS: Go through another forest. If we come out the other side, great.
• 49:09
  GARTH ENNIS: But we just… we know we're gonna have to do something similar tomorrow. It's that, it's, I suppose, what you might think of as a… as a tour of duty aspect, rather than a secret mission.
• 49:20
  GARTH ENNIS: aspect, and of course, you know, I'm not naive. I know that most people who read fiction do prefer that special job, that secret mission, but it… it's just something I have less interest in.
• 49:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I…
• 49:33
  GARTH ENNIS: Having read so much military history and memoir, I'm aware that the reality of it for most people is very different. I'm sure if you spoke to any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan of the past 20, 25 years.
• 49:47
  GARTH ENNIS: They would not be talking in terms of operations that shortened the war, changed the war, changed the world. They'd be talking about an endurance test that had to be performed before they could go home.
• 50:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah.
• 50:02
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm… I'm a target audience for that. I love the stories of the stuff in between.
• 50:09
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I, I, I, I love…
• 50:12
  Tad Eggleston: I love when time is taken to not just show…
• 50:17
  Tad Eggleston: The big, meaningful action, but, like… What it feels like.
• 50:23
  Tad Eggleston: To just be.
• 50:24
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 50:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, whether it's a war story, or…
• 50:28
  GARTH ENNIS: Try Gosshawk Squadron, that's his first novel, and it was shortlisted for the Booker in 1971, so that's a good place to start, you know, if you like that one.
• 50:39
  GARTH ENNIS: You'll probably like the rest.
• 50:41
  GARTH ENNIS: son.
• 50:42
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds good. I mean, it's, it's, it's definitely on my list.
• 50:47
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately, it looks like the only…
• 50:49
  Tad Eggleston: audio versions right now are A Good Clean Fight and Hello Russia, Goodbye England, and I do.
• 50:56
  GARTH ENNIS: Go for a… Go for a good clean fight out of those two. Okay. That's a good one.
• 51:02
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 51:04
  Tad Eggleston: I do most of my prose listening to it on… to and from work at this point, because comics take up my reading time.
• 51:13
  Tad Eggleston: Which, which I also don't mind. But…
• 51:17
  Tad Eggleston: But this is the type of book that I do like to sit down with, so it's… yeah, you've sold me, Garth. Possibly the next time we'll talk, I'll go, I read Gosh, Adrian, and oh my god.
• 51:30
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah, it's funny, you know, I mean, half an hour from now, I'll think, I should have said Christmas cake, or…
• 51:37
  GARTH ENNIS: I should have said really good bourbon, or, you know, but that was what came… that was what came to mind when you asked me that. And it's a good question, too, because it's always nice to push something that people haven't heard of.
• 51:50
  Tad Eggleston: I developed it very early on in the podcast. I didn't want to do the stupid, tell me something underrated, because…
• 51:59
  Tad Eggleston: That's… I don't like to think of things as underrated, overrated, blah blah blah.
• 52:04
  GARTH ENNIS: But the…
• 52:05
  Tad Eggleston: There are things that everybody loves
• 52:10
  Tad Eggleston: That they don't have people to talk about it with.
• 52:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Y-you know?
• 52:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and sometimes I get weird answers, like… like, one of the times Nate Powell was on, it was Jonathan Hickman's X-Men, and he's like, I know everybody is reading this, but… but I'm an indie cartoonist, not among my friends.
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: You know? So Garth, thank you so much.
• 52:34
  GARTH ENNIS: Oh, my absolute pleasure, Tad.
• 52:36
  Tad Eggleston: spending an afternoon with me, hopefully we get to do this again. Don't be grateful.
• 52:42
  GARTH ENNIS: Yeah.
• 52:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, for 22 panels, we will see you after the next page.